Broken Lines (26 page)

He was probably right about that. ‘So it's somebody who never did anything like this before, and never would have done except that somehow Mikey and me both, together or separately, wound him up enough.'

‘Wound him up?' Incredulity soared in Roly's voice. ‘How do you wind somebody up enough to make them want to beat you to death?'

Donovan barked a desperate laugh. ‘Jesus, Roly – you're asking me?'

Momentarily that knocked the wind out of Roly Dickens. For a second he saw himself through Donovan's eyes: a thug and a madman, dangerous and unpredictable, so warped by anger that no brutality was beyond him. It was not a flattering picture; it wasn't how he saw himself. All right, he'd broken a few legs in his time, but that was business. He never hurt anyone who didn't deserve it. He was a fair man. People didn't cross him, they made a point of laughing at his jokes, but they weren't scared of meeting him in a dark alley. He was more respected than feared.

But Donovan was afraid; with good reason. Roly would have been afraid in the hands of the man this had made of him.

When he spoke again his voice had dropped to a thick growl. ‘You took something from him that mattered more than his freedom, more than his conscience, maybe more than his life. You hurt him more than he could bear. You took something that he couldn't get back, that he couldn't replace and that he couldn't be compensated for. Somehow you ripped the very heart out of him. Mr Donovan, you
must
remember doing that to someone.'

‘But I don't.' Deep as he dug, his memory held nothing like that. He'd angered some dangerous men in his time but every one of them would have taken, the baseball bat to him, not Mikey. ‘Roly, I swear to you, I didn't do that to you and I haven't done it to anyone else. What about Mikey, has he ever—?'

Donovan couldn't see the disgust in Roly's eyes but he could hear it in his voice. ‘Mikey's a thief. He steals from people. That's all. To the best of my knowledge he's never hurt anyone more than enough to separate them from their belongings. A black eye, maybe a cracked rib or a broken nose. This wasn't about a broken nose.'

‘Then what was it about?'

Roly thought about it a little longer. His voice came back iron-hard, Siberian cold. ‘Maybe it was about a man seeing his credibility, his career, even his love-life heading down the tubes thanks to some cocky kid who wasn't old enough to know that everybody – everybody – has a breaking point. Maybe that's all it was about all along.'

The blood froze in Donovan's veins. He had to force words past a constriction in his throat. ‘No. Roly, I swear to you. For Christ's sake, Roly! Don't—'

Neither of them altogether believed it. They talked about it almost in the hope of dissuading themselves. But they kept not quite succeeding.

‘Consider the profile of the people we want for this,' said Shapiro. ‘We want someone strong enough to beat Mikey, and someone, with small hands to prepare the weapon. It doesn't have to be but was probably a man and a woman. They have to hate both Mikey and Donovan with equal passion. The Taylors had just lost a baby they'd been trying for for ten years, in a crash that happened because Donovan was pursuing Mikey.'

‘They were living apart,' Liz objected faintly. ‘Would they have tackled something like that together?'

‘In a rational state of mind, probably not. But they weren't, were they? Whatever Taylor said, it was natural that they'd get together again after the miscarriage. They were upset, they were angry. And they're two intelligent, educated people, well capable of working out an act of vengeance if that's what they decided on. They just had to stay angry long enough to carry it through.'

‘So Pat set it up – phoned Mikey, pretended to be me, asked to meet him – and Clifford went to Cornmarket armed with a baseball bat?' Liz shook her head, still not quite convinced. ‘I'd have
sworn
he was being straight with me.'

Shapiro shrugged. ‘He's an accountant. He couldn't do the job if he blushed every time he had to tell a lie.'

Clifford Taylor was picked up at his office, Patricia Taylor at the school. They were fetched in separate cars and shown into separate interview rooms. Neither was informed of the other's presence.

Had time pressed less urgently, given the seriousness of the allegation Shapiro would have interviewed them both himself. But that could waste an hour, and Donovan mightn't have an hour to spare. Shapiro took Taylor, Liz took his wife.

Taylor was obviously anxious, but everyone is if a squad car comes for them. He asked what it was about. Shapiro gave one of the stock answers designed to convey no information, and Taylor didn't ask again. Perhaps he was reluctant to make a fuss; perhaps he already knew.

‘Do you own a life-jacket, Mr Taylor?'

The man looked at him as if he was mad.
‘What?'

‘A life-jacket. A buoyancy aid. Keeps you afloat in water – you know the sort of thing. Do you have one?'

Taylor knew what a life-jacket was. He didn't know what possible interest such a thing might hold for the detective. ‘No.
Why
, for heaven's sake?'

‘How about a set of oilskins?'

‘I've got some waterproof trousers that I play golf in. Does that count?'

‘Could do, could do,' Shapiro nodded slowly. ‘And a sou'wester?'

‘No! Superintendent—?'

‘What about a boat?'

‘I don't have a boat,' Taylor said with a kind of desperate clarity. ‘I don't have a boat, or anything to do with boats. I don't know anything about boats.'

‘Really? But you keep two at home.'

Taylor blinked. ‘Oh, those – Yes, I suppose. All right, yes. But I don't live there any more, and I hardly used them when I did.'

‘I hardly use my lawnmower, but I wouldn't deny owning one.'

‘They came with the house, I never thought of them as mine.'

‘What are they?'

Clearly Shapiro knew or he wouldn't be asking these questions. Taylor answered anyway. ‘One's a rowing boat, the other's got an outboard engine.'

‘Works, does it?'

‘I have no idea.'

‘When did you use it last?'

‘Ages ago. Years. Maybe the summer before last.'

‘So if it was in use recently, that wasn't you.'

‘That's right.'

‘Came with the house, hm?' mused Shapiro. ‘Left you some gear too, did they?'

Taylor thought. ‘I believe they did. In the shed. I don't know what.'

‘A life-jacket? Oilskins?'

‘Possibly.'

‘A sou'wester?'

Taylor closed his eyes for a moment. He knew this wasn't routine questioning. He was being accused of something. But this was a man who took on the Inland Revenue for a living, he wasn't going to crumble in the face of disbelief. ‘Superintendent, at the risk of stealing your next line, we can do this the hard way or the easy way. The easy way is where you tell me what I'm suspected of and I try to show you you're mistaken. The hard way is where you keep talking double-Dutch and I send for my solicitor to translate. I'll answer any question that I understand, but I'm not going to answer any more that I don't.'

Behind the careful blank of his expression Shapiro found himself agreeing with Liz. The man seemed straight. He was protecting himself just enough and not too much. If he'd come in here with a battery of high-priced lawyers it would have suggested he had something that needed careful explaining. If he'd waived his rights under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in selfless determination to assist in the inquiry at whatever cost to himself, Shapiro would immediately have been suspicious. No, this was a good performance. If it was a performance.

‘All right,' he said. ‘Cards on the table? We know what the incident involving your wife's car cost you. Inspector Graham guessed and Mrs Taylor confirmed it. I'm very sorry. You must feel intensely bitter towards the young man responsible. Bitter enough to put him in the hospital? Bitter enough to cast suspicion for that on Detective Sergeant Donovan? – because he might have prevented the tragedy if he hadn't left Mrs Taylor upside down in her car?'

Clifford Taylor regarded the policeman across the table for what seemed a long time. His eyes were steady. At length he said, ‘On the whole, I understood better when you were talking about boats.'

‘We're in here, Mrs Taylor,' said Liz. ‘Could you—?' She was carrying an armful of things she didn't need so that Pat Taylor would open the door of Interview Room 2 for her. She couldn't be sure that a viable right thumbprint would be left on the knob but it was worth a try. Pat Taylor wouldn't accede to a request, and obtaining a warrant to take her fingerprints without consent would take time. As she settled herself at the table and started the recording equipment she could hear Sergeant Tripp unpacking his dusting kit in the corridor outside.

‘I don't understand this,' said Pat Taylor tersely. ‘You said you wouldn't bother me again.'

‘Yes,' agreed Liz bleakly. ‘Things have moved on. I now have reason to suspect that your involvement with Mikey Dickens didn't end at Chevening roundabout.'

‘I don't know what you mean,' said Mrs Taylor.

‘I assume it was Clifford's idea,' said Liz untruthfully. ‘It was his baby too, there's no reason he'd feel any less strongly about it. He'd invested ten years in it too, he knew as well as you did there'd only ever be one chance. When you told him it was gone he must have been beside himself with grief and rage.'

‘Clifford,' said Pat; and there was a hint of a question in it, as if she wanted to make sure they were talking about the same man. ‘Clifford and I are separated.'

‘That would look better,' nodded Liz. ‘Even if you planned on getting together later, it might be wise to wait a while. If people aren't thinking of you as a couple right now they won't suspect you of anything needing two pairs of hands.'

‘Such as?'

Pat Taylor was not an easy woman to interview. She was always tense, which made it difficult to know if she was more than reasonably anxious now. When interviewing suspects it was useful to watch what they did in the pauses. People who were hiding something relaxed a little when the pressure was off. People who weren't wanted to get on with it, wanted to prove their innocence: a long silence worried them. Pat Taylor just sat there, bolt upright, with the same stern expression whether Liz was speaking or not. Her manner was like a thin cloak of icy disdain folded about a fierce outrage, and it was hard to be sure whether she was angry at being accused of something she hadn't done, angry at being caught, or just angry at the things which had gone wrong with her life.

‘Such as laying a trap for a young thug neither of you could have dealt with alone. Such as manipulating the evidence to incriminate someone else you thought you had reason to hate.'

‘I've no idea what you're talking about, Mrs Graham,' said Pat Taylor coldly.

Liz waited for her to say more but she didn't. More than anything, that iron restraint persuaded her that this time they were on the right track. No one accused of a violent crime kept that quiet without a very good reason.

She wished Sergeant Tripp would hurry up. One firm connection between this woman and any aspect of the crime, and they were in business. She would get all the detail then because there would be no further point in concealment. No jury would miss the fundamental significance of Pat Taylor's fingerprint at one end of the baseball bat and Mikey's blood at the other.

But Liz couldn't wait while SOCO performed his alchemy with dusting-powder and magnifying-glass. She had to make a working assumption and press on.

‘I imagine Clifford wore gloves,' she said. ‘Anyway, it was a beat-up old bit of wood, he'd hardly have left prints if he hadn't bothered. Then he returned home – not to his flat in town, to your house, using the boat moored at your landing – and you helped him with the next phase, which was shifting the blame on to Donovan. The tape was a good idea: you did it because Clifford's hands were shaking. Attempted murder does that to a man; the first time, anyway.

‘When you'd finished you wiped over the tape to remove any prints. But in handling the tape you'd left a print on the inside, the sticky side. That print will tie you to this crime, and there's nothing you can do about it.'

Again she waited. But she wasn't expecting Mrs Taylor to collapse in tears and confessions, and she didn't.

‘Except for one thing,' Liz continued, ‘which is help me now. Tell me what happened, while there's still time to save Donovan's skin. I have to tell you, that's the single most important thing you can do in your own best interests. The judge will recognize that, in the end, you tried to limit the damage you'd done. He'll also bear it in mind if you don't.'

Pat Taylor said, ‘Save Donovan?'

Liz breathed heavily. They hadn't time for this; but she couldn't force a confession out of the woman, if she insisted on playing the fish Liz would have to act the angler. ‘Mikey's father has him. Roly Dickens is a professional criminal, a man who keeps other criminals in line by brute force, and right now he's feeling how you felt when you lost your child. He thinks Donovan beat Mikey's head in. When you lost your baby you wanted to kill the man responsible. I imagine Roly Dickens feels the same way.

‘I can stop him if I can get word to him that the people who attacked Mikey are in custody. An honest statement from you is Donovan's best chance, but it has to be now. He may be hurt already: the longer this goes on, the likelier it is it'll end in tragedy.'

She was determined to say no more. She watched Pat Taylor's face and waited for a response. The woman must know by now that she wasn't going to leave here. She hadn't yet given the fingerprints that would confirm her guilt, but she must know she would have to. She wasn't even bothering to protest her innocence. She was going to pay for what she'd had a part in, all she could do now was haggle over the bill. She was cornered, there was nowhere else to go.